WHAT I INTEND TO DO ABOUT DYLANN ROOF…

…I expect this to be the last time I build a BLOG post around his name.

I’ve reread the manifesto that the young man has been credited with writing, have recognized what the excerpts have indicated… that much of the text has been lifted from American white supremacist, racist WEB sites… have seen the boy in those pictures… have been filled with regret and ultimate sadness that the boy dropped out of high school when he was in ninth grade apparently without parental or other guidance that he should have received growing up in America… that he could with little personal effort have got his hands on the guns he displays in his pictures… and that he could walk into a public meeting in a church without having caused alarm on the part of anybody… and that he has managed to raise a Storm of media attention, not just in America but all over the world… and that he has become an icon representing ignorant racism (and ignorance generally) in the United States of America and in a world where other sad, sad pictures of persons will soon displace his as representatives of that ignorance.  Whatever he hoped to accomplish by his action will be lost, along with the lives of the nine people he killed.  That’s all I think I should say about DYLANN STRONG ROOF

Now… going on to another matter: the President’s dropping the word nigger in a radio interview. All over America since his use of the “N” word,  politicians (especially those who have declared that they are running for his job in 2016), preachers, civil rights leaders,racists, non-racists and all kinds of “ordingary” citizens have weighed in on his saying nigger. 

Give me a break.  We all know the background. I am among those people who avoid the use of the word for the same reasons the President avoids using the N-word… BUT to make the word unsayable under any circumstances is a huge mistake. I don’t say it for the same reason that I never say, “I wish those goddamn gun-loving motherfuckers who sell drugs and guns and … the list goes on… especially to young kids like you know who would drop dead in their tracks and never be heard of again on this earth anywhere. I don’t say such things.  

I’ll focus my attention on important symbols like the Confederate flag, which continues to fly in South Carolina’s Capital Plaza and which continues to be used in other areas with approval and at the direction of misguided politicians who insist that forbidding the use of that flag infringes on “the people’s” private civil rights expression. What a lot of b.s. that is.